Impact of the erase algorithms on flash memory lifetime

This paper presents a comparative study on the impact of the erase algorithm on flash memory lifetime, to demonstrate how the reduction of overall stress, suffered by memories, will increase their lifetime, thanks to a smart management of erase operations. To this purpose a fixed erase voltage, equal to the maximum value and the maximum time-window, was taken as the reference test; while an algorithm with adaptive voltage levels and the same overall time-window was designed and implemented in order to compare their experimental results. This study was carried out by using an innovative Automated Test Equipment, named Portable-ATE, tailored for Memory Test Chip and designed for performance evaluation at research and development (R&D) level, where testing adaptability, configurability together with capability to get immediate results are the most significant [1-3]. The results show how the adoption of the smart adaptive algorithm allowed to increase the attainable erasing cycles from 750 thousands to a total number well beyond 1 million cycles.